Clock is ticking on getting that holiday job

By SUE STOCK, THE (RALEIGH, N.C.) NEWS & OBSERVER

Published 10:00 pm, Sunday, November 5, 2006

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Don't dally if you want a job in retail this holiday season. Although just about every store is hiring, retailers are interviewing now and will pick most of their temporary workers by Thanksgiving. On top of that, stores are not planning to hire more seasonal workers this year.

Nationwide, stores will add about 700,000 employees for the holidays, about the same as last year, said John Challenger, CEO of workplace consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

"Every year, the largest surge comes in November," he said. "So it's very important for people to be out there right now trying to land that role."

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Many larger stores are planning to hire hundreds of workers for the shopping season.

"We increase our staff by triple the number of regular employees," said Dana Shepherd, manager of a Barnes & Noble in Durham, N.C. "We really see applications come in throughout the year."

The reason for the stagnant hiring is not what you might think. Retailers have gotten past fears that high gas prices will keep people from spending. The National Retail Federation expects sales to grow a solid 5 percent this year, to $457.4 billion. Last year, holiday sales were up 6.1 percent.

But nationally, some retailers say they are concerned that other factors, particularly the national housing slump, will hurt holiday sales.

Limited Too spokesman Robert Atkinson suggested that the growth of online sales and gift cards has alleviated the need for a surge in the number of people hired as in-store help.

"Quite frankly, it's really not a bad thing," he said. "More and more sales are going to gift cards, which don't even get recognized as sales until they're redeemed. And Internet sales are getting bigger. Even though they're not counted as in-store sales, they're certainly becoming a big number."

Other retailers say that the explanation for holding holiday hires steady is more simple.

Target will hire about the same number of seasonal employees as it did last year, between 50,000 and 80,000, spokesman Joshua Thomas said. That's 50 to 80 additional employees per store.

"It depends on the demand we see in our stores, and that would be consistent with years past," he said.

Electronics giant Best Buy hired about 28,000 seasonal employees nationally last year and plans to hire 22,000 to 23,000 this year, spokeswoman Dawn Bryant said.

"That's still a 22 percent increase from what our regular staffing levels are," she said. "We've really been working on efficiencies in our stores, and we feel that's the right number of employees."